Are Two Cloud Servers Better Than One?

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Jennifer Parker.

Cloud computing is fast becoming as ubiquitous as the clouds circling the Earth. As more and more people depend on “the cloud” to store sensitive data, they also realize it isn’t perfect —and sometimes it fails because of storm surges or human error. The fact is there will be outages. If you only have one server location, you are exposed,” said Bernard Golden, vice president at enStratus Networks, an IT consultant supporting providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Storage, and VMware. “The appropriate response is to operate switch regions,” he said.

Events such as Amazon Web Service’s outage in October, which affected its most heavily used data center in Virginia, support Golden’s claim. Some AWS customers, such as Netflix, have duplicate cloud systems. As a result, their businesses stayed up and running during the outage. Others, including popular sites like Reddit and Pinterest, temporarily went dark…

Hurricane Sandy also tested the cloud systems of McGraw Hill, which operates a cloud-based data server in lower Manhattan. “The electricity went out, and the system went with it. But customers weren’t impacted, because they have enough other data centers to keep it going. There are backups on the West Coast, in New Jersey, even London,” said Vipul Nakum, who worked as product team manager for Standard & Poors, now owned by McGraw Hill…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cnbc.com/id/49746409